


Night Warden On Duty!

by TheRebelDread



Category: Thief (Video Games)
Genre: Amnesia, Dubious Consent, Ghosts, M/M, Mental Instability, Psychological Horror, Supernatural Elements, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-30
Updated: 2015-08-30
Packaged: 2018-04-17 19:44:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4678991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheRebelDread/pseuds/TheRebelDread
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>NO loitering in the halls.<br/>NO noisemaking in the rooms.<br/>Keep doors CLOSED.</p>
<p>
  <i>'You wanna see the light? So do I..'</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night Warden On Duty!

**Author's Note:**

> Of all the characters and creatures left unexplained in Thief, The Night Warden fascinated (and terrified me) the most. I always found myself wondering why he still guarded the halls of Moira. I wanted to know who he was. And what, or who, he was looking for. After many trips to Moira, this is what my brain came up with. Twisted as it may be..

Moira Asylum was eerily quiet. In every room and every hallway, except for the Men's Ward. There was a banging in the halls that echoed in Garrett's skull. He felt it slamming in his chest, and his heart beat faster to catch up with the rhythm. It sounded as though it were chasing him, and Garrett's lungs burned like he'd been chasing something too. A memory, perhaps. The sound was almost familiar.

He leaned back against the broken tile to catch his breath. Moira was empty - had been for months. But suddenly Garrett felt like he wasn't alone in the asylum. There was a sign on the wall across from him, dusty and faded:   
 

**NIGHT WARDEN ON DUTY!  
** **NO loitering in the halls.  
** **NO noisemaking in the rooms.  
** **Keep doors CLOSED.  
**   


The noise was everywhere. Was it coming after him? A fragment of a memory cracked through Garrett's thoughts, sharp and sudden, and gone and quickly as it had come. No, he thought. Whatever it was, it wasn't coming for him.

"A distraction." He muttered under his breath, and the burning in his lungs eased. He didn't know why, but he knew. Garrett closed his eyes and listened. He waited for the noise to pass down the next hall, and ran. The sound of his footsteps was lost in the banging of the halls, but by the time he reached the room at the end of the hall, it was coming back around. Moving with practised speed, as quietly as he could, he picked the lock. _One. Two. Three._ When the door swung open, the banging stopped.

There was a moment of quiet. One, single breath of a silence that made his ears ring, and then his feet left the floor. An unseen force pulled Garrett into the room and slammed him against the wall. Tile crunched at his back and shattered like broken teeth. Garrett felt breath at his neck, and a long, deep groan in his ear like something that had been belched up from the pits of hell. It sent a chill down Garrett's spine; cold and warm at the same time, and it sunk into his bones.

 

"Sneaking out again, Garrett? You never learn." The voice was almost a mechanical purr; turning clock gears and grinding stone.

Garrett could see nothing in front of him but a shadowy blur; and a feeling akin to having one too many pints at the Burrick washed over him.

He may have been blind to whatever was taunting him, but Garrett could hear the smirk in the grinding, smokestack voice. "Your friend's distraction is a nice touch. Did you come back to play?"  
 

Garrett's mind was churning hallucinations and nostalgia, waves crashing against his cognizance, seawater and the coppery bite of blood on his tongue. He spoke with words dug up from an old box in the dusty cellar of his mind. "Why, did you miss me?"  
 

A laugh rumbled against his ear, and Garrett felt soft lips that he couldn't see. "I think it's _you_ who missed _me,_ thief. You wanted so badly to get out; always picking locks and slinking in the shadows. But you still came back." Garrett felt hands on him, touching him. They tugged his mask down and caressed his face. "I think you do it just to tease me." The Warden's voice was close to his lips, and made him warm all over. He felt drunk, and vaguely recalled the time he and Basso drank with a pirate from an island in the west who claimed he'd seen the future. He laughed at the memory, and thought he saw a flicker of the Warden's eyes in the shadowy blur.

"Maybe I do." Garrett didn't know what he was saying. He didn't know what this _thing_ was - he didn't even know his own mind. But something about this situation felt familiar, and this ghost felt disturbingly human. The asylum was making him crazy. Or was it the other way around?

"You were always trouble. So charming with your smirks and your pretty eyes, lifting silver syringes off the nurses when they weren't looking."

No, that couldn't be right. Sure, it sounded like him, but Garrett had never even been on this island before, let alone as a patient....Had he?  
 

"You don't remember, do you?" The Warden asked, sounding almost sympathetic. And Garrett didn't. It was as if someone had turned him inside out and scraped away his memories. He couldn't even feel. There was nothing left in him. Nothing but the voices.

   
_'Garrett, I'm slipping.'  
_

He felt the air shift around him.  


"Let me help you remember." The Warden's ghost delivered a deep and unholy moan that shook the walls and rattled the asylum to its core. Garrett couldn't see it, but he sure as hell felt it. It started in his chest, where it bubbled to the surface and spilled over every part of him. Euphoria seized him without warning. His body pulsed with it, his nerves thrumming to a rhythm that had his hips arching off the wall. It was too much and not enough all at once, and God help him, he thought he might explode with it. Until, without warning, it stopped, and Garrett was left out of breath yet again - for a very different reason.

Something flashed behind his eyelids. A dream. A memory.

"What the hell was that?"  
 

"She wants you to forget," the Warden purred, "But I want you to remember. Do you remember me, Garrett?"

He felt the Warden touch the scar beneath his eye, and the feeling shot between his thighs. It was like being struck by lighting, and it rolled through him; warm, pleasant vibrations everywhere the Warden touched. Garrett moved without conscience, reacted without thought, palming at his own length through a layer of worn leather.

"What are you doing to me?" His voice was far away, he felt sleepy. But something inside of him was waking up.

   
"Do you remember?"

   
"No.." He could hear the blood rushing in his ears as an invisible hand loosened his belt and slid down his trousers. "Who are you?"

   
_"Do you want to know the truth? Where you've been?"_ The Warden used a mockery of Erin's voice, slowed down and scratched like a worn out record.

 

_'I want to sleep like you did..'_

 

"I was asleep." His cock slid through the Warden's hand, slow and steady. He didn't know why it was happening, but God, he couldn't stop it if he wanted to.

The Warden laughed. "You _never_ slept. You were too busy trying to get out. That was a mistake. I tried to warn you."

Garrett tried channeling the Primal within him. He blinked his heavy eyes, and as the room flashed blue, the shadow in front of him briefly took a human shape before fading away. The Warden growled and Garrett moaned as the sound pulsed through him.

"You're gonna have to do better than that."  
 

"Nghh..what do you want from me?" Garrett was slurring his words, pushing his hips into the unseen force making his head swim.

"I want you to focus, Garrett. Tell me what you see." That accent.. it sounded so familiar. Nothing like the cold, half drunken slur of City speak. It was warm, like the sun kissed sand of a far away island.

He heard Erin's voice in his head again. _'No! ..Garrett! Give me the claw!'_

 

The Warden squeezed his cock. The deep groan that left him was hot against his lips, and Garrett was there. Waves of bliss and searing heat crashed over him again and again. He was fucking shaking; nails digging into the broken tile behind him. It was too good and too much, and just when he thought it might burn him from the inside out, a white light pierced through his conscience, and then he saw him.

He was tall. Taller than Garrett remembered. Everything about him was dark; striking eyes and smooth, Illyrian sun darkened skin. He remembered his accent; how it sounded sweet, even when he would curse Garrett in his native tongue. Garrett could remember a few words; only by the shape of his mouth as he spoke them. He remembered his voice and his eyes, and his hands around his throat. That growl, low in his ear, ' _Sneaking out again, Garrett? Didn't I tell you to stay in bed?'_

The Night Warden.

 

"Ezra." His name sounded sweet but foreign on his tongue. A forgotten taste.  
 

Ezra smiled, his teeth white against his dark skin. "Good." His hand brushed Garrett's cheek, and for a moment he felt only warmth. "You were always running from me, always trying to get away. I tried so hard to stop you. You may have escaped, but I can _never_ leave." The mechanical growl crept back into his voice, and Garrett felt his chest tighten. "Do you know why, Garrett?"

But the memory was already slipping away. Garrett's head was beginning to ache and he reached out to touch the Warden's warm skin, licking his lips to search out the taste of his name that was fading from his lips. "What happened?.. Why can't I remember?"

The banging had returned. In the walls, in his head. Everywhere.

 

"Now I'm going to show you what she did to me." Ezra pressed his palm flat against Garrett's chest and pain flooded his every nerve. It was like shards of broken glass ripping through him from the inside; piece by bloody piece, and if there was air left in his lungs, Garrett would have screamed. He could feel the life draining from his body, dripping on the floor to flood the cracks between the tiles and spill into the gutters. The pain was beyond anything. Would there be anything left of him at all? Nothing left of flesh and bone - only his breath and soul would remain - trapped within the walls of Moira. Forgotten.

 

_'Maybe this is where the dead wait when they've got no where else to go. And now you're here.. Are you dead, Garrett?'_

 

The Warden removed his hand and the pain stopped, but Garrett couldn't remember how to breathe.

   
"She's poison, Garrett." his voice was gentle, and as he spoke, Garrett watched him slowly dissipate. "She's already killed me, and now she's killing you too." God, he was beautiful. What was his name?  
  
_No._ Erin. He was here for Erin.

The Warden gripped his throat. The hell-deep bellow of his voice made the walls shake, and Garrett's lips felt numb from the lack of air. "Stop holding on. Sacrifices must be made, Garrett. Let her go.. Or you'll end up like me."

And then he was gone.

   
Garrett's vision was fading, along with his memory; blank spaces and empty rooms. As his knees hit the floor, he glanced at his hands, expecting to see blood, maybe even part of his lungs and shards of bone that he could tuck under his mattress. But there was nothing. The numbness reached his mind, and as darkness took him, he heard her voice - cold, like the waters that threatened to swallow this Godforsaken island.  


_'Garrett, I'm slipping!'_  
  


But within the waves he heard whispers, so hushed a breeze could have swept them away before they reached his ears.

_  
'Let go, Garrett. Or she'll take you down with her.'_

 


End file.
